Is Ethiopia’s Bloody Civil War at an End?

‘The devil will be in the implementation.’

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Happy Friday! We can’t believe the Le Gruyère AOP Surchoix beat out the Gorgonzola Dolce DOP at the World Cheese Awards this week. Totally rigged.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

  • Former Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan was shot in the leg yesterday at a political rally calling for snap elections, an attack that party members are calling a political assassination attempt. One person reportedly died and several others were injured in the shooting, and police have arrested a suspect. Without providing evidence, Khan has blamed current Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif—who led April’s successful effort to oust Khan from office—Interior Minister Rana Sanaullah, and intelligence leader Maj. Gen. Faisal Naseer for Thursday’s attack. Sharif condemned the shooting, but Khan’s supporters have begun protesting across Pakistan.
  • The FBI’s Newark office announced Thursday—without specifying details—that it had received “credible information of a broad threat to synagogues” in New Jersey and urged security precautions. State Attorney General Matt Platkin said law enforcement would increase patrols in “sensitive areas” out of caution. “To those who made these antisemitic terroristic threats: We will not cower,” New Jersey Rep. Josh Gottheimer said in a statement, blaming anti-Semitic comments from public figures like rapper Kanye West and basketball player Kyrie Irving for contributing to a rise in antisemitic incidents. The Brooklyn Nets suspended Irving on Thursday for at least five games after he repeatedly refused to apologize for promoting a film laden with anti-Semitic tropes. Irving apologized shortly after his suspension was handed down.
  • House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced Thursday that her husband Paul was released from the hospital yesterday and will continue recovering from last weekend’s attack at home. The Department of Homeland Security confirmed yesterday that the alleged attacker in the case, a 42-year-old man, was in the United States illegally after entering from Canada years ago.
  • White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters yesterday that U.S. Embassy officials in Russia met with detained WNBA star Brittney Griner for the first time since Griner’s appeal of her nearly decade-long prison sentence—which the United States holds is wrongful—was rejected. “We are told she’s doing as well as can be expected under the circumstances,” Jean-Pierre said.
  • Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s comeback is official, with the country’s election committee releasing final results yesterday showing a coalition led by Netanyahu’s Likud Party—and joined by the far-right Religious Zionism and Otzma Yehudit parties—held 64 seats in the 120-member Knesset. Current Prime Minister Yair Lapid called Netanyahu to concede, and issued a statement wishing him well. “The State of Israel comes before any political consideration,” he said.
  • CVS and Walgreens announced this week they had tentatively reached agreements on two separate settlements worth approximately $5 billion to resolve a number of lawsuits against the pharmacies over their handling of prescription painkillers and alleged contribution to the United States’ opioid crisis. 

Ethiopia Agrees to Silence the Guns

Redwan Hussein (L) of the Ethiopian government and Getachew Reda (R) of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) shake hands during a press conference regarding the African Union-led negotiations to resolve conflict in Ethiopia on November 2, 2022. (Photo by Phill Magakoe / AFP via Getty Images.)

Ethiopia’s two years of war have killed thousands of people, displaced millions, and driven many more to the brink of death via starvation or preventable diseases. Now the conflict might be coming to an end.

After about a week of peace talks in South Africa, negotiators for the primary combatants—Ethiopia’s federal army and Tigrayan forces—announced Wednesday they’d agreed to a permanent ceasefire. “The two parties in the Ethiopian conflict have formally agreed to the cessation of hostilities as well as to systematic, orderly, smooth and coordinated disarmament,” African Union mediation team leader and former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo said at a press conference.

Though tensions reach back decades, the current conflict broke out in November 2020. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed had come to power in 2018 after the fall of a decades-long ruling coalition led by Tigrayans, and he won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 for ending a longstanding border conflict with neighboring Eritrea. But he alienated already disgruntled Tigrayans, and tensions eventually escalated into violence. Territory changed hands—Ethiopia’s federal army driving into Tigray, Tigrayan forces threatening Ethiopia’s capital—but the fighting eased somewhat in December after Abiy decided not to follow retreating Tigrayan troops. A humanitarian truce declared in March gave citizens some relief from the bloodshed but also allowed both sides to prepare for more fighting. The ceasefire dissolved in August, and in recent weeks Ethiopia’s army has made significant gains, taking several towns.

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  1. Clarity

    Barro's post is deeply flawed: "[Biden's message of the danger posed to democracy] is of primary interest to the most core voters in the Democratic Party coalition. They are sure to vote for Democrats already — in fact, many of them have already voted. The idea that telling voters about January 6 one more time would help anything is just crazy.”

    Wrong, this message is of critical importance to independents and anti-Trump Republicans - the swing voters who can still decide this election and the next. It isn’t just about January 6 - it was never just about January 6. It’s about a man who never believed in democracy, elections, accountability, rule of law, or the balance of power between three independent branches of government. And now it is about a party that is united behind Trump's views.

    Why does anyone in their right mind think the Democrats are smart enough to pursue moderate policies to be sure that Trump doesn’t regain power? The Republicans weren’t smart enough to unite and prevent Trump from stealing their party. They didn’t torpedo Trump after the Access Hollywood tape. Allowing HRC to be elected was too high a price.

    Likewise, why should anyone in their right mind think the Dems are smart enough to pay the price to stop Trump today. They even failed to impeach Trump on charges that would attract more votes from Republicans (dereliction of duty to protect the Capitol, failure to defend the Constitution by claiming VP Pence had the power to reject Electoral Votes). They tried to get rid of the filibuster in order to pass a VOTING Rights bill on a strictly partisan vote - even when they knew they didn’t have the votes. Biden claimed the power to reduce student loan debt even though Pelosi publicly said Biden didn’t have that power. Instead of tackling the problem of WORLDWIDE inflation head-on; they have left the issue to the Republicans. Instead keeping a system that minimized the flood of immigrants over the border and demanding bipartisan immigration reform from Congress, Biden ceded this issue to the Republicans. The Democrats failure to recognize what needed to be done to permanently stop Trump doesn’t excuse intelligent independents and Republicans from failing to do what needs to be done now.

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    Electricrook

    The problem with conspiracy theories is that far too many of them are actually real.

    The sad fact is that labeling your opponents data as "the stuff of conspiracy theories" is a common rhetoric tool.

    We saw this abused with the COVID lab leak theory, and statements that to even think COVID came out of a lab is a racist conspiracy theory.

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    1. Clarity

      When Trump proposed the "lab leak" hypothesis, it was a "conspiracy theory", because Trump didn't provide any evidence or rational for his accusations. Trump adopted his conspiracy theory for purely political reasons, not because his scientific advisors told him it was a viable theory.

      Recognizing and quickly identifying the causative agent of this pandemic probably couldn't have been done without the technology and staff of a major Chinese urban area. Every major Chinese city - and American city - has some kind of research institute dedicated to viral diseases, usually HIV in the US and coronaviruses in China. Wuhan happens to have two. The fact that COVID was discovered in a major Chinese city doesn't tell us any more about whether the virus escaped from a Chinese lab than it would if it had been identified in a US city.

      The most likely scenario was that SARS2, like SARS1 evolved in bat-ridden Southern China, and was carried to Wuhan in an intermediary species sold at the Wuhan Seafood Market. However, in the year following the outbreak of the pandemic, we hadn't identified such an intermediary species, nor had we seen additional spillover events from a reservoir in animals. Furthermore, SARS1 mutated more quickly than SARS2 early in the outbreaks, suggesting that SARS2 was better adapted to humans when it was discovered. These are serious drawbacks with this hypothesis.

      The lab leak hypothesis has far more severe problems. Where did SARS2 come from? It isn't close enough to any previously known coronavirus to believe that it was created by experiments intended evolve an existing virus so that it could grow better in human cell lines (gain of function experiment). With dozens of known coronaviruses that could be used as a starting strain for such experiments, why would the Chinese have chosen to start with an unknown strain with no obvious importance?

      More likely, SARS2 or a close relative was collected from bats and escaped from the lab. In that case, SARS2 WAS the product of natural evolution that could have made it to humans via a bat biting a person somewhere in Southern China, or a bat biting a technician in a Wuhan, or a cell culture experiments leaking and infecting a technician. In these cases, transmission to humans was inevitable, but the Wuhan lab could have made it happen sooner.

      In all of these scenarios, we need to recognize that the existence of asymptomatic and mild infections would have made it difficult to identify a few infected people in an isolated rural community in South China and track one of them to Wuhan, or track early transmission from a Wuhan technician to the earlier patients identified in November of 2019. We now know that infected people brought SARS2 to the United States many times in January and early February of 2020 without out our recognizing the problem - despite our knowing exactly what to look for. In November and October of 2019, the Chinese didn't know what to look for and had little opportunity to track the path of a new disease when many infections were mild or asymptomatic. The Chinese were still holding out hope that COVID wasn't being transmitted from person to person in early January, because they still hadn't detected transmission to a hospital worker, something that must have happened many times in December.

      Now some have claimed that the Chinese knew of a problem at the WIV or elsewhere in October and November and kept the news quiet. These are real conspiracy theorists. The Senate minority report suggests that a Chinese researcher must have begun working on a vaccine in November to have been able to file a patent in late February, but the Oxford group had completed their experiments similar to those in the Chinese patent by early February! The idea that the Chinese knew they had a serious problem at the WIV or elsewhere before December 2019 and didn't warn local doctors about what to look for is positively absurd. SARS1 and MERS were contained by early detection, isolation and contact tracing and Chinese doctors did the same when they identified SARS2. The powers that be in the Chinese system did do their best to hide bad news and only pass it up to their superiors when absolutely necessary, and that did delay transmission of information inside China and to the rest of the world. Nevertheless, the word of the problem in Wuhan leaked by numerous routes within days of sequencing the virus. The city warned residents to wear masks on December 31. Taiwan was screening passengers on flights from Wuhan and Hong Kong was screening passengers on trains from China by January 2. The head of the Chinese CDC called the head of the US CDC on January 1 and January 3. Dr. Li Wenliang and others spread the word over Chinese social media and were disciplined. A Chinese virologist arranged for the sequence of SARS2 to be posted on January 11 without receiving permission. Singapore identified a suspected case in a traveler from Wuhan on January 4 and South Korea and Thailand on January 8. It is improbably that the Chinese understood what a pandemic had begun in October and November, especially if it came from a laboratory.

      Strains of coronaviruses in bats much more closely related to SARS2 were identified in Laos, just across the border from bat-infested Southern China. These viruses use exactly the same molecular machinery on their spike proteins to enter mammalian cells via the ACE2 receptor as SARS2, but they lack the furin cleavage site found in SARS2. Could a bat harboring this virus bite a human (or animal that lives around people) and start a pandemic. Possibly, but antibodies from early victims of COVID prevent human cells from being infected. It is unlikely that a furin cleavage site was genetically engineered into a coronavirus producing SARS2 because the furin cleavage site found in SARS2 is not the optimal sequence a genetic engineer would choose.

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    Michael Berkowitz

    A little nitpicking:

    Netanyahu hasn't actually formed a government yet, and though there's little chance he won't, you could wait 'til it actually happens.

    He doesn't get to 64 seats with just his Likud and the Religious Zionists. It assumes that the ultra-Orthodox parties join as well.

    Also, I think there's a non-negligible probability that he'll include the National Unity Party and/or Yisrael Beiteinu, which would shift the center-of-gravity somewhat leftwards.

    Otzma Yehudit didn't run as an independent party but as a faction of the Religious Zionist Party.

    Lastly, though I won't argue over the use of the term "far right", if you're getting your news from the English Haartetz news site, or the Jerusalem Post or Times of Israel, you're getting a window onto Israel like the one the New York Times (not to say NPR) would provide onto America: Mostly right, sometimes wrong, often incomplete.

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    1. Nikitas Hatzimihail

      Just listened to the latest Dispatch podcast, where Adaam the web editor interviewed Tomer Persico. Very good. If the right-wing coalition had a total of 61 seats, probably Netanyahu would try and include them, but with 64 ….

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        Michael Berkowitz

        I don't think he's under 𝘱𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘶𝘳𝘦 to expand the coalition, but he may want to. First, if his own policy inclinations are actually to the left of his partners he can add a party that will pull in that direction. Second, it dilutes the power of the other parties, making their demands less insistent.

        I haven't heard Persico yet, I'll have to listen soon.

        But who knows?

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    Jones_randy

    The next TMD event should held in Peachtree City, GA. A suburb of Atlanta.

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  5. Fiona B

    What time do you get up to do the Morning Dispatch, Declan? Or is it mostly written the night before? Just curious about what that schedule is like.

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  6. Steven Betz

    San Francisco. We are trying to build a center right movement here in line with dispatch oriented views. Please check us out https://www.brionessociety.org/

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  7. Dawnkoch53

    Denver--please!

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  8. Aaronganz

    Long Beach Convention Center in California 😎

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    Chris.James.Burton

    Planning an event in the Pacific Northwest would draw out a lot of politically homeless people from the likes of Portland and Seattle.

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    Barry Alexander

    Detroit.

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